“Officer Tillis, who was the man you shot?”
“Don’t know. His ID said he was Ronnie Lewis.”
“You ever met him before?”
“No. He was a stranger to me.”
“That so? This interview is conducted just like any internal-affairs investigation. If you lie to me, you can be dismissed. Did you ever meet Ronnie Lewis before?”
“No. I never met the guy, that’s the truth.” Delbert’s voice rose with righteous conviction.
“No, Delbert. That’s not the truth. Let me tell you what the truth is. You knew Ronnie Lewis. You met him at least twice. You were on transport the last two times he was arrested. Transporters don’t have to sign anything as long as there’s no injury to the prisoner. Reasonable that you’d think there was no way to connect you two, but I matched up the arrest times on the paperwork with the dispatch calls on the runs. They keep the tapes of those calls for three years, Delbert. I heard your voice on them. You knew Ronnie Lewis. You knew Ronnie Lewis was down at the end of the road when you went there.”
“I did not.” Tillis’s voice quivered as the impossible became the inevitable.
“Delbert, you couldn’t see the car from the road. You had no reason to go down there unless you knew someone was there.” Kincaid stopped. “This is important, Del. This is premeditation. This isn’t positive policing, this isn’t street initiative. You went down there to meet a man you already knew. We’re waving goodbye to negligence, hello murder two.”
“Murder two? Are you nuts, man? I told you I shot the guy. It was an accident. I didn’t mean it.”
“That’s the beauty of it, Delbert. I believe you, I really do. Have from the beginning. It was an accident, and it was murder.”
“You’re crazy, man. I don’t have to listen to this bullshit. I want my union rep here. If you’re so damn certain of all this, why hasn’t Homicide picked me up? That dyke bitch would love nothing better than to bust my ass. I was with her at the academy. She was a ball-cutter then, she’s a ball-cutter now.”
“That was the hard part, Delbert: motive. Motive and intent, that’s what I needed. You can stop the interview now if you want. We can wait for your union rep to get here. I don’t care if you don’t say another word. You might want to hear what I have to tell you alone, though—without him here. See, I don’t think they’re going to be too eager to rush to your defense. Are they?”
Tillis stared back, impassive, defiant, but wondering if Kincaid could back up his words.
“I wanted you to be a simple schmuck, Delbert. A poorly trained, unqualified guy who had no business being a cop, sent to do an impossible job without the tools. I could have pounded on your failures like a drum while I preached my personal brand of truth. You were almost as big a victim as Lewis. That’s what I wanted to see, but you wouldn’t let me. No, you’re anything but simple, Delbert. You’ve failed to qualify twice. Once more and you’re out of a job. I’ll bet you’re not independently wealthy. Your friend Ronnie Lewis is not a captain of industry either. How do a small-time hood and a marginal cop turn that around? Work with what you’ve got. Here’s the best part, Delbert. I’ll even spot you being careful about your plans, but you should have used a better quality target than Ronnie. He called an attorney to represent him in a shooting. Last week. So Ronnie’s either clairvoyant or incredibly stupid. I’ll go for number two.” Kincaid watched Tillis try to stifle his disbelief at Lewis’s stupidity and greed.
“You like that, huh? What a fool. Couldn’t wait to get shot first, then line up the lawyer. Who knows, maybe all the good ones would be taken. Here’s where your accident becomes murder. I see an insurance fraud here. You shoot Lewis. He sues the city for what? A million dollars? Isn’t that typical these days? You two split the proceeds. Your ineptitude and lack of training provides the necessary element of negligence. Hell, my report would have been your best piece of evidence. This shooting was definitely unjustified. In fact, let me tweak this one a little bit. You get a lawyer and sue the department for negligence in your training—you shouldn’t have been allowed out on the streets with a weapon. Hell, I’ll stipulate to that. You double-dip your ineptitude and walk away a millionaire. Now that’s a golden parachute. Every other cop on the force pays your severance pay. I don’t think so.”
“You haven’t said a word about murder, Sergeant. It’s what it always was—an accident.” Tillis even smiled a bit, confident that Kincaid was blowing smoke and couldn’t prove the points he was making.
“Murder it is. A person killed in the commission of a felony is murder two. Fraud’s a felony. You knew him; you went to a secluded place to meet; your partner had lined up an attorney to represent him in a gunshot case. That’s a conspiracy. You were to provide the bullet. And you did. That makes it murder. And an accident. You meant to shoot him, not kill him. I said I believed you.”
The door to the interview room opened and Detective Seymour walked in. She had her right hand extended toward Tillis. She moved her index and forefinger together like scissors and went, “Snip, snip.
“Delbert Tillis. You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law …” The Miranda warning went on as Tillis shook his head.
“What tipped you off? Why even bother to look into this? I mean, what could have been more open and shut?”
Kincaid knew that all violent deaths were best approached as open and shut: with an open mind and a shut mouth. “It was something you said, Delbert. From the very first, you said it was a mistake. You didn’t mean to kill him. That’s right. It was a mistake. You didn’t mean to kill him. But you never said you didn’t mean to shoot him. That’s what bothered me.”
This one is for Adam, who when he saw the light, his spirits rose and he was young again.
SERIAL KILLERS
VERN BIGELOW AND GARNET SIMMS
Meeting of the Minds
Vernon Bigelow came over the rise and could not believe his good luck. It was on him like one of his spells, and he had to double clutch and downshift or he’d have blown right on past.
He pulled his rig off the road and came up behind the metal-flake blue Firebird. A white rag was tied to the antenna. He sat in the cab and looked for the driver. Not in the car, not up ahead. He glanced in his rearview mirrors. Nothing behind him. He turned off the engine, reached down and grabbed a short iron bar from next to his seat, and unlocked the door. You can’t be too careful, he reminded himself. Being a Good Samaritan got a lot of people killed, and he wasn’t going to be one of them. He jumped down from the cab and walked around its big red hood, patting it like it was the nose of his number one dog. He put almost a hundred thousand miles a year on this rig and it had brought him some mighty profitable loads, mighty profitable indeed.
Vernon walked alongside the Firebird. Low and wide, its body gleamed and sparkled like a giant beetle. Nobody in the backseat sleeping, no “Call the Police” card in the rear window.
Just a pair of big old custom speakers in each rear corner.
He felt the hood. Cool. It had been here awhile.
Vernon looked up and down the road and saw no one. The sun was in retreat and would vanish in thirty minutes. Orange and purple pastels smeared the bellies of the clouds above.
There wasn’t much traffic on this road at high noon, he mused; after dark there wouldn’t be any at all. Thirty miles in either direction to the nearest towns. Nothing but woods and fields on either side. A farmhouse now and then back off the road. Tobacco and corn hadn’t been taken in yet, but the cotton was all gone. Fluffs of white all over the ground, debris after the pickers had been through.
Vern pulled the driver’s handle. The door was unlocked. He opened it and looked inside. No car phone, no CB. Behind the front seat were an old rag and an empty plastic grocery bag. Vern took one last look around, put the bar in his pocket, and ducked his head inside. He popped open the compartment between the bucket seats. A couple of maps, some napkins, a p
encil, a petrified mint, and the car’s papers. The shifter curved up from the floor like a giant metal talon with an eightball impaled on the end of it.
Vern opened the pouch of papers. All the warranties were on one side. The other had the safety inspections, the emissions inspections, the insurance ID card, and the registration. He started to pull that out.
“God, am I glad to see you.”
Spooked, Vern jerked himself upright and reached for the iron bar in his pocket.
“Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me,” he yelled back at the woman standing in the field facing him.
“Sorry ’bout that,” she yelled back.
“Where the hell were you?” he asked.
“In the woods. I couldn’t wait any longer. Must be my lucky day. I was sure I’d leave and somebody’d come by and just keep on goin’. I’ve been standing out there with my thumb out for forty-five minutes.”
She high-stepped it across the soft ground, gingerly crossed the ditch by the side of the road, and then stood on the other side of the car.
Vern wished he’d seen her by the side of the road, thumb out. He’d a pulled over, unlocked the door, and helped her into the cab. She’d get in, flash him a smile, thank him for being so kind. He’d tell her this was no place for a girl to be all alone. What with it getting dark and all. He wished he’d seen her like that, but this was all right too. She had on a pair of bluejean shorts, tight, with the bottoms rolled up, and a white blouse pulled up under her breasts and tied in a knot, so her stomach showed. She could have been tighter, but she was okay. Her breasts looked like they were okay, too. Soft, but not too droopy, big but not too big. Hell, what was he thinking, he couldn’t remember a breast that wasn’t okay.
Vern reminded himself not to stare, it put people off, and asked, “What’s wrong with your car?”
“I don’t know. It ain’t my car.”
“Well, let’s open her up and see what’s wrong.”
Vern reached under the dashboard and released the hood.
He walked around the car to the front, pulled up the hood until the hydraulic support rod caught. He wiped his hands on his jeans and stuck one out.
“My name’s Vern, Vern Bigelow. What’s yours?”
The woman didn’t take his hand. She took a step back and Vern noticed her right hand was in her purse.
“Okay.” He flashed a big grin. “That’s cool. You should be cautious, out here all alone, broken down, me a stranger, things bein’ the way they are these days.” He held up his hands. “Why don’t you go on over there a ways, keep on going until you feel safe, and I’ll look under the hood here. Okay?”
She took a couple of steps back, so that she could easily keep the car between them.
Vern scanned the car’s engine for anything obvious. “Can’t see anything wrong. Why don’t you get inside and turn it on?” He’d been watching her out of the corner of his eye the whole time. What was in her purse? he wondered.
She came around the far side of the car, then in two long strides slid into the front seat and locked the door.
Vern came around the hood. “Turn the engine on. If you don’t do that I can’t tell what’s wrong.”
She just sat there staring at him, doing nothing.
“Lady, if you don’t turn the car on, I can’t help you.”
Still nothing.
Vern looked around. It was dark now. He couldn’t even see a house light in any direction. He walked up to the front window and leaned over.
“Tell you what. You just sit in there with your hand in your purse. What are you gonna do, spray perfume in my face? I’m gonna go back to my truck and leave you here. While I’m driving down the road, I’m gonna be thinking about how scared you must be and it’d be pretty mean to leave you out here all alone. That might lead me to stop in town and call the police and have them come out and pick you up. Then again, I might start thinking about how you wouldn’t even do me the courtesy of starting your car when you were all locked up safe inside, and all I was trying to do was help you. I spend too much time thinking like that and I know I won’t stop anywhere and call anyone.”
Vernon stood up and turned to walk away.
He spun back, pulled the iron rod from his pocket, and swung it ferociously at the glass. Inside, the woman threw her hands up in front of her face and screamed.
Vern tapped the glass lightly. “One last thought. This glass won’t protect you. When they say shatterproof, it just means the glass won’t explode in on you and cut you or blind you when someone hits it, like with an iron rod, or a baseball bat, or a hammer, or a rifle butt, and then pushes the glass out of the way to reach in and pull you out through the window.”
Vern smiled, pleased with himself. “Just thought you’d want to know that before I leave.”
He walked back to his truck, unlocked the door, took a step up, and swung himself into his chair like he was mounting a horse.
He put the rod back in its place and turned on his lights. Dumb broad, serve her sorry ass right if something happened to her, he thought. Something real bad. She didn’t know common decency when it fell out of the sky on her. Decent people knew decency when they saw it, ’cause they practiced it. You couldn’t appreciate what you didn’t practice. Vern Bigelow knew that to be the truth.
Vern turned his engine on, checked his rearview mirror, and prepared to follow his headlights, his own personal moons, into the darkness. There was a pounding on his other door. Vern leaned over and looked down. It was her. He opened the door.
She brushed a wayward swatch of dark red hair out of her face and then raked it back with inch-long crimson nails. It hung down her back in a long braid, like a bell pull.
“First, you gotta …”
“Garnet Simms, but everyone calls me Red,” she said, taking his hand and climbing in beside him. No smile. No thank you, Vern noted.
“That’s pretty fortunate, you turning out to have red hair and all.”
“Not really. All the kids in my family got red hair. My mother was running out of names—Scarlett, Ruby, Rusty, Rose—by the time I came along. That’s enough about me. What’s your name again?”
“Vern, Vern Bigelow.”
“How’d you happen to be coming up this godforsaken road, Vern? I’d just about lost hope of ever being picked up. You ain’t haulin’.”
“No. I just dropped a load in Weldon. Going to pick up a sealed one down at Morehead City, at the port there. Figured I’d take the scenic route. I spend most of my time on the interstates. You from around here?”
“Why do you ask?” she said, turning to face him.
“No reason. But like you said, this ain’t a main road or nothing. I don’t ever see much traffic here, except other rigs that are overweight and late, bypassing the stations, and locals. Locals, it’s just out one driveway, up the road a couple of miles to another driveway.”
“No. I ain’t from around here.”
Vern finished looking Garnet over. She was wearing clunky platform shoes. He hated them when they first came around, and he still hated them. Damned ugly things to find at the end of a woman’s legs. She had no rings on her fingers. Funny, what with her spending so much time on those nails. That bag of hers was a regular satchel.
Garnet let him check her out, and when he got to her face she gave him one of her starter smiles. One without any teeth or dimple to it.
She hadn’t checked herself out in a mirror, except in the Firebird, since early in the afternoon. Her hair needed to be brushed back and refastened. She hated it when it got in her face. If it was up to her, she’d have chopped it all off. But then things weren’t always up to her, were they?
Garnet knew she wasn’t pretty. She was attractive. That was a bit more than plain, which beat ugly by a long shot, but still short of pretty. With pretty you didn’t have to work so hard, you could coast along behind pretty. She knew plenty of girls who did that. Beautiful? Beautiful killed her. It was a crime, being beautiful. Lik
e stealing. She’d thought about plastic surgery for a while. If God shafted you, you could always do it yourself. But surgery was expensive. She knew. She’d looked into it and Garnet was no closer to having that kind of money than the day she’d left home.
No, attractive was just a slight pull, like two real tiny magnets. You had to boost that signal. Fortunately there were lots of boosters around. Clothes, your walk, bad habits, smiles, touching their hands for no reason, letting them help you with everything, makeup, giggles, certain ways of looking at them, listening to their every stupid word. Enough of that and they didn’t see the crooked teeth, the acne that ruined your junior year, the overbite, the nose that was too something, every damn thing that didn’t add up to pretty.
Vern smiled back. That was better, he thought. A thank you would have been in order, but he’d let that pass.
“Your car all locked up?”
“Yeah, but I told you it wasn’t my car.”
“Okay, your boyfriend’s then.”
“It ain’t my boyfriend’s neither. I didn’t turn it over ’cause I didn’t have the keys!”
“Then what were you doin’ out here?”
“I told you. I was hitchhiking. I hadn’t got a ride in almost an hour. I’ve been walking up the road, thumb out. I had to go so I hiked back into the woods. That Firebird was here when I got here. You saw that rag on the antenna. Something broke down, the guy probably got a ride to town to get it towed and ain’t come back yet. That’s all. I figured I’d hang around awhile, try to cop a ride when he got back. Then you showed up, and got all pissy.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were a bitch and here I was, just trying to be helpful. You could have said all that.”
“Yeah, well, you were right about me being out here by myself. I was scared. So I just locked myself in. Your little trick with the pipe didn’t help none neither.”
Mary, Mary, Shut the Door Page 27
